Off to Colorado

I’m sitting in the Burbank airport listening to the 80s Muzak that they always play here and waiting on a flight to Denver for a few days back in Colorado. It’ll be interesting being back there again, seeing some family and friends and hopefully doing my yearly hike up Pikes Peak on Thursday (the weather’s looking like rain, however). I still miss Colorado and sometimes wish I could live there again, but L.A.’s really better for running my website and for “the scene” in general. Like I’ve said many times, I love Los Angeles but it can be a royal pain to live here. Colorado, on the other hand – hardly any stress at all. So it’s a trade-off as so many things in life are.

In Atlanta

So I’ve been in Atlanta over the weekend to see my parents, who are both old and in shaky health. It’s been a pretty good visit but I’m ready to head back tomorrow to Southern California. The most challenging thing about visiting is trying to help my mother with her computer and realizing that she’s never going to figure it out. It’s a generational thing and she tries her best (bless her) but, yeah, it’s never going to happen and always feels like a slightly depressing and futile exercise trying to show her how to use Skype and organize the files and folders on her hard drive and so on. After a couple hours I just want to go for a long walk to clear my head. But I know I’ll miss them when they’re gone so I’m sure it’s good to be here.

Off to the Marta train to the airport tomorrow, though, and back to LAX. I’ll be glad when August passes and we finally start to get into the fall and winter, the best months for crossdressers…

Valentina Tagline from Guido Crepax

So the other week I asked on the Trannies Yahoo Group if anyone knew where I’d taken the most recent tagline from on the Trannies In Trouble site (the little phrase in quotations under the main title). At that time it was, “”I shouldn’t have come…I didn’t want to…I wasn’t going to.” Well, I’m sure the suspense has been kiling everyone, so the answer is that it came from the Guido Crepax cartoon, “Valentina in Reflection” from Heavy Metal magazine, December 1980. Yeah, rather obscure but somehow that line got stuck in my head over three decades ago and has never left. (The line “But originally I said no” was another one that seemed weighted with significance and got stuck in my long-term memory.)

I remember getting that magazine in the mail on a late afternoon in Colorado. I recall that before walking back into the house I caught a quick glimpse of the picture below, got immediately turned on and then walked inside to find a friend of my mother’s there in the kitchen visiting. Strangely enough, this was the same woman who on an earlier visit had told me I should have been born a girl, which really threw me into a state of embarrassment and sexual excitement. (For some reason she was alone in the kitchen on that earlier visit and when I walked in she glanced at me – I was very slender and had long hair – and she uttered that startling sentence.) So anyway, here I was again with this same woman (don’t recall if my mother was there too), once again sexually agitated and after a few awkward moments I excused myself and went down to my room to immediately check out the rest of this cartoon (that one page was the best one unfortunately). I don’t recall if I rubbed one out while my mother’s friend was still visiting or whether it was later that evening but I’m sure it happened at some point. Weird the things you remember and the details you don’t.

In any case Guido Crepax is pretty fantastic though I’d always wished he’d done more blatantly bondage oriented stuff. Still his drawings were always very strange and sexy and he was obviously hugely talented. Good stuff.


FetishCon 2012

It was a busy weekend at FetishCon this year. I arrived a day early and ended up doing a lot more shooting than I was planning to, which was good but kept me even more busy than normal. On the downside, though, I didn’t get nearly as much time on the show floor as I had planned, and didn’t get many good casual out-and-about pictures. But here are a few sample shots, shooting with the amazing Jean Bardot, a young model named Jennifer West who was a real trooper (shot by Jeff Jamm), Sybil looking cute as a helpless maid, Brittany Morgen with her elbows touching, a pantyhose encasement by Master Allen, the fabulous Serene Isley being tied up by Sandra in creepy fan mode, and a serious gagging session with Natalia Chaplin turning out to be a femme fatale and ignoring my limits (video framegrab).

For the times that I was able to get away from shooting, it was a lot of fun seeing people whom I only see once a year, such as Andre the Toonman – we had a really nice time hanging out and visiting. So all in all, although it flew by, it was good getting to shoot with so many friends and terrific models, and I look forward to posting some new pics in the weeks and months ahead…